Damian White | Designing the Just Transition: Recovering Our Capacity for Democratic, Ecological and Labor-Centered Worldmaking
The Department of Technology, Culture and Society and the Center for Urban Science + Progress (CUSP) at NYU Tandon welcomes you to attend a research seminar by Damian White, professor at Rhode Island School of Design. This event will be held in Room 1201, located on the 12th Floor of 370 Jay Street.
About the Lecture:
Designing the Just Transition: Recovering Our Capacity for Democratic, Ecological and Labor-Centered Worldmaking
Over the last decade, discussions of labor-environmentalism and labor/ecologies have offered one of the most important spaces for debating how we might organize, struggle, and fight for post-carbon just transitions that serve the interests of working people. In this talk, Damian White draws from his new book, Designing the Just Transition (Bloomsbury, 2026), co-written with the landscape architect Nicholas Pevzner, to explore how the tangled and often forgotten labor and environmental histories, and contemporary labor/ecology struggles occurring in design, planning, and architecture, might provide us with some of the tools and imaginaries that we will need to push back against fascist joy, Climate-induced melancholic paralysis (Wark, 2016) and AI doom.
Design is not to be trusted. However, this book argues that just transitions will not emerge solely through protest and policy shifts. Rather, just transitions will also have to be materialized, built, coded, created, imagined, desired, and enacted on an ongoing basis by many hands and many skills. Such an observation raises critical further questions about what material agencies will be required to enact just transitions on a warmer, more restless, and more turbulent planet. In this talk we consider how a climate-labor politics that centers and celebrates the creativity and dignity of labor, that champions designs that augment rather than undercut our labor, and that seeks to open up broader spaces for joyful, sustainable worldmaking might provide tools to fight back against right populisms, end-times fascisms (Taylor & Klein, 2026) and disaster nationalisms (Seymour, 2024) that offer the transgressive promise of deriving pleasure, excitement, thrills and validation from exacerbating the suffering of others.
About the Speaker
Dr. Damian White is a political sociologist and political theorist. His current research interests are focused on the political sociology of design/architecture and planning; environmental-labor studies, labor-centered and worker-centered design; urban political ecology; post-carbon transitions; the political sociology of design futuring; and the politics of populism.
Visitor Information
This event will be held in Room 1201 at 370 Jay St. Please visit the NYU Tandon website for directions and a campus map. Advance registration through Luma is required for campus access at NYU for external guests.